This is really well stated feedback that actually gives a lot of insight into what their thought process could have been with the nerfs. Hopefully they look into the unintended side effects you mentioned. I worry it might be a bit of an overcorrection, especially for colossus, or even warriors who are still leveling and a bit rage starved due to lack of abilities.
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A simple fix for that would be to have Revenge cost zero rage and instead have it’s proc generate some amount of rage, instead of 20 cost and free on procs.
They could just add the ignore pain effect to revenge and get rid of ignore pain. Increase the cost of revenge to like 30-40 rage. Off GCD we’d have shield block like normal but for rotation we’d have to choose to build or spend with each GCD instead of spamming ignore pain to dump rage. I wouldn’t be against something like that. It would also help to mitigate the rage problem Colossus has.
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Why
Why do you think this
Who picked up Prot Warrior and said “gee this class is a little too fun, I wish we could slow it down and make it boring”
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Let’s face it, the prospective prot changes are using a chainsaw where a scalpel is better suited for the job.
There’s no denying that Mountain Thane spams Ignore pain to an egregious amount since they cast less revenges due to their on gcd ability usage being flooded with Shield Slam procs from Lightning Strikes and Thunder clap, let alone the additional rage from Thorim’s might. It has to be spent somewhere to avoid overcapping, plus it ends up providing a benefit to the warrior in getting cooldowns faster through Anger Management.
Whereas the polar opposite Colossus doesn’t have as high of a rage income so it relies predominately on picking up the increased rage generation talents which are copping some significant nerfs or their flat out removal, which will negatively impact it’s more offensive revenge use which fuels their larger ignore pain cap from no stranger to pain’s synergy with Brutal Vitality allowing for defense through offense so it allowed for a much more aggressive playstyle in keys where you could overpower through sheer damage once fully geared. This playstyle is also severely punishing if mismanaged since you needed to have a lot more awareness of your ignore pain, which is quite a fun difference to Thane’s spam.
What should’ve happened ‘nerf’ wise to bring thane down just a smidge without effecting everything negatively was to remove the rage entirely from Thorim’s might, the fact that this node on the hero talent is so dominant compared to the very minor lightning strikes proc increase it’s competing with and the excess rage it provides.
Then the second thane targeted nerf would be to “burst of power” where it should probably have a reduced or no rage generated by the first or second shield slam in it’s proc so that it’s not flooding you with excess rage, while still having a beneficial damage and a defensive portion to it if talented into Heavy Repercussions.
Feels awful with them having gone the gut the baseline spec option as opposed to focusing on the problematic hero talents.
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Spamming Ignore Pain, an off-GCD ability, wouldn’t really slow down the class if it was removed. It would be like calling Guardian Druid fast-paced because you spam Ironfur.
It’s just that disincentivizing spamming Ignore Pain without affecting other aspects of the class is tricky.
I believe part of the problem is how Blizzard is posing the question to themselves:
“How do we keep protection warriors from being flooded in rage?”
Their proposed changes do accomplish this task for both Mountain Thane and Colossus.
The proposed changes also have a feel of being Half-Baked due to their massive repercussions and reverberations throughout the rest of the interacting mechanics. We lose more than we gain from these. We lose durability, damage-dealing potential, gameplay flow, and most importantly: Fun.
With only five abilities in the Protection Warrior toolkit costing rage, it’s hard to balance the consumption of rage with the flow of incoming rage. Revenge, Shield Block, and Ignore Pain are the only reliable sources of consistent Rage consumption during gameplay. As it stands right now the process of decision making for Protection is limited in scope and effect.
“Current design causes undermining rotational defensive decision-making and encourages constant dumping of Rage into Ignore Pain to maximize effectiveness.”
These proposed changes do nothing to alleviate or alter the decision making process. The only goal accomplished with these changes is to slow down and limit the amount of times we can press Ignore Pain.
The decision making is still going to follow: Keeping Shield Block up, Pressing Ignore Pain with enough rage to cast Shield Block before it falls. Press Revenge to keep rotation from stalling. Now we’re just penalized harder for playing poorly or still learning how to use rage effectively.
There’s just not enough in the toolkit currently to justify how decision making can be altered by rage economy. Protection Warriors are still going to spend excess rage on Ignore Pain if Shield Block is active and the rotation is still going. Colossus is disproportionately effected by these proposed changes because their rage expenditure is much higher due to the design of revenge being integral to the mechanical identity of the Hero Tree.
“Item Level will fix it.”
Probably true. Protection Warriors will probably not feel some of these changes once we get into mid-late stages of The War Within. That’s not fun for leveling Protection Warriors, or “right now” Protection Warriors.
“These changes aren’t final!”
After years of playing Protection Warrior and getting consistently nerfed into oblivion after a enjoyable season and left to languish the remainder of the expansion pack, I don’t have faith that the turn around to address these issues will be expedient.
The question probably that needs to be asked is this:
“Do Protection Warriors need Rage as a resource anymore?”
Blizzard could revert these changes, and instead eliminate rage completely from Protection Warriors and do the following:
-Rage cost of Impending Victory, Shield Block, Execute, Revenge, and Ignore Pain removed.
-Shield Block, Revenge, and Impending Victory otherwise unchanged.
-Ignore Pain gains a charge system similar to Shield Block. Has a longer duration than it’s recharge time. Applies max ignore pain per cast.
-Execute always acts as if 40 rage was consumed.
-Protection Warrior gameplay unaffected due to current rage economy.
-Eliminates concerns of overcapping rage, or spamming of Ignore Pain
-Creates a skill level for juggling charges of Ignore Pain and Shield Block.
-Improves gameplay for Colossus by removing rage economy concerns.
I’m aware that this wouldn’t a feasible or real solution, but I don’t know if blizzard is asking the right questions to themselves is these changes are the answer that they’re arriving at.
5 Likes
I would first ask the main question which everyone should.
“Why do we need to nerf anything for Protection Warrior?”
We are not meta, we are the least taken tank in raids, we don’t do the most damage and we don’t have immunities for specific scenarios or raid utility to cross the bridge of us being loved. So why?
Instead of doing something that is completely pointless focus on making classes more compelling in Raids or M+ and tune paladins down so the rest can be invited to M+ too. Simply put if your guild does not have DK dps you HAVE to play DK on Broodtwister/Skilen yourself. My Warrior cannot even be useful there, and now you want to gut us even more? Where is the logic?
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Yep, just a taste of what’s been happening to holy paladin as well.
They like to brag about having all these “tuning knobs”, but are clueless as how to best utilize them.
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It does seem whomever is proposing these warrior changes have never played the class beyond a +12 key.
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It’s concerning that there’s no feedback from Blizzard about this fairly unpopular change.
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Nerfing one instance of rage generation is one thing nerfing most forms of rage generated is just foolish and proof whoever is the warrior lead don’t play the class. On top of that forcing Colossus warriors into a constant rage starved state the whole change of execute no longer generates stacks of might is just more proof they need someone who honestly plays warriors to look into the design.
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Playing Colossus on PTR now is like playing vanilla wow… Are the devs implementing something without testing this at all? It’s a disaster to play.
Revert all the stupid changes to rage, nobody wants that, we are not the top tank because of it. We are catching up to the top because of it! How on earth is this so hard to understand…
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Granted I’m not sure how you actually test rage generation if little incoming damage. May have to do follower dungeons (ew).
Pulling this back to the top
Rage generation feels awful right now. Nerfing tactician proc rate is not the move.
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If they want to nerf rage generation start small not nerfing every source of rage.
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If blizzard wants feedback; there’s not much more to say:
-These changes are awful. They don’t make the class better and they don’t accomplish what was their stated goal and intentions for the proposed changes. Please revert these changes and look at different avenues to address the issues on hand.
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Issue is Blizzard seems to not be listening to Warrior Feedback they will not even give us a blue Feedback post. Its a bit annoying.
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This is a terrible change and will destroy my class
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Well they did end up buffing damage lol.
Dunno if the changes are fun, though.